35 pages • 1-hour read
If you were coming in the fall
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Themes
Eternal Love
“If you were coming in the Fall” plays with the poetic cliché of eternal love. In most stories, love is often placed on a pedestal and treated like something that conquers all things. This romantic vision of love is common in books, plays, poems, and movies, and this idea has even bled into culture where many people believe in the power of love to last through all trials and tribulations. Poems like Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” (1849) express this concept of a love that is so strong it even transcends death, a concept Dickinson also uses in this poem. However, where Dickinson differs from other works that explore this concept is she questions love's ability to transcend the heartbreak and despair of time. As the speaker ponders on the time they will wait for their love, they almost talk themself out of fantasy and into a realistic understanding of just how long time can be. They realize that while love is strong, waiting is excruciating and may be stronger than the love they have for their lover.
This inversion does not necessarily discredit eternal love, but it frames it in a more realistic way that acknowledges the difficult nature of life. Even if one feels they have eternal love with another person, everything will not suddenly be perfect. Love does not shield people from doubt, worry, longing, and pain.
Longing
The theme of longing and the emotions that accompany longing are strong throughout this poem. The longing and separation between the speaker and their love leads to doubt and fear. Even the way the poem is written from a single perspective mirrors the feeling of being apart and longing for connection: Just as the speaker’s love and longing goes unanswered, so it goes in real life. In situations like this, there is no way of knowing whether the other person is feeling the same desire to be reunited, and this uncertainty only adds to the feeling of time that makes being separated so difficult.
Dickinson is detailed in her description of how people handle the feeling of longing. People initially dismiss the longing as something that can be managed, then people try to come up with logical systems for how to handle the feeling until finally people accept just how difficult it is to miss a loved one. As time goes by with no resolution, that giddy feeling of reunification slowly fades and is replaced by the desperation of distance.
Time
Though people try to dismiss time or master it, time always wins. As the poem progresses, the lengths of time the narrator must endure become longer and longer. Ultimately, once time turns into eternity, the speaker must acknowledge their inability to conquer time through patience and love.
Time in the poem also refers to the time of the speaker’s life as expressed by the first stanza’s seasons. The speaker is willing to sacrifice time to wait for their lover, and not just any time but the best time of their life: the summer. This early optimism and bravado show how naive the speaker is at the start of the poem. However, as the time increases, so too does its power and threat, leading the speaker to come back to reality and to confront the true danger of time. Dickinson expresses this through the transformation of the fly to the bee. At the beginning of the poem, the seasons are waved away like one waves away a fly. It is done “With half a smile, and half a spurn” (Line 3), or halfheartedly and absentmindedly. By the end of the poem when seasons have turned into centuries, time constantly buzzes in the speaker’s ear like a never-ceasing threat that can’t be ignored. At this point, the speaker gives time their respect.
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